


Moving Day

by hoperise



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Childhood Memories, F/M, Fluff, Hurricane Peralta Strikes Again, I'm Sorry, Misunderstandings, Present Tense, Romance, Two Shot, relationships are hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-04 19:22:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4149801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoperise/pseuds/hoperise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It would shock none of his coworkers to discover that Jake loves a certain amount of clutter (he doesn't feel totally comfortable without it, actually). Mess means permanence. Cleanliness means transience. Jake has found a place that he loves, and he isn't going anywhere.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. His

Jake hates boxes.

Hates them.  
  
He tolerates them for holding case files, understands their importance in the workplace.  
  
But there is not a single cardboard box to be found in the Peralta Bachelor Pad. When he moves from Nana's apartment to Gina's old place, he unpacks within two days. After that, if he hadn't found a place for something, he'd rather dump the box on the floor than have an accursed brown cube continue to occupy in his living space.  
  
It would shock none of his coworkers to discover that Jake loves a certain amount of clutter (he doesn't feel totally comfortable without it, actually). Amy complains once that he is a human hurricane of chaos and crumbs - that his movements through the precinct can be tracked by the lopsided stacks of files and open cupboard doors he leaves behind.  
  
Jake smiles and says that he's doing her a favor.  
  
When Amy initially transfers to the Nine Nine, her neatness bothers Jake. Amy's desk is sparkling clean; Hurricane Peralta fixes this for her on a regular basis. Eventually she gives up and accepts a certain amount of collateral damage from his whirling spiral of energy. When she starts to personalize her own desk with photos and rubber band balls, he knows that she isn't going anywhere.  
  
Mess means permanence. Cleanliness means transience.  
  
Mess is difficult. Mess takes time to remove. Cleanliness means that all of this can go away at a moment's notice.  
  
His mom worked two jobs to make ends meet and they lived under a constant threat of eviction. Young Jake's room always had a few stray boxes lurking on a shelf or buried under a pile of laundry. They had to be ready to pack up when the lease ran out. Of his half-dozen childhood bedrooms, Jake remembered clean white walls, free of thumbtacks and nails so they could keep their security deposit, and constantly messy floors.  
  
Nana's apartment was a box-free zone.  
  
She always had a basket of half-folded laundry draped across a couch or cookie dough dishes cluttering her sink. His scented-marker drawings of superheroes and cops were tacked into her walls.  
  
Young Jake liked that. He'd left a mark somewhere; he'd left an imprint that would never go away.  
  
Nana said that you don't need to pick up for family. Mom rolled her eyes at her mother like it was a bad joke, but she bustled around the apartment with a bottle of multi-purpose cleaner, scrubbing till her hands were red when Grandma came to town.  
  
Present Jake thinks that Nana was on to something. He has his own apartment now, his own little slice of permanence. The first thing he does in Gina's place is tack up his posters and hang his basketball hoop on a nail. If Gina makes him, he'll pull out the Spackle and fill in all the little holes, but there's no way that he's going to stay in another room with bare white walls.  
  
Present Jake remembers what Nana said about family when he gives Sophia the bottle of multi-purpose cleaner and lets Amy into his apartment without a second thought.  
  
Amy brings her own boxes into his life. Jake welcomes her clutter and informs her that her boxes have forty-eight hours before their contents are dumped inside and the empty containers are chucked in the hall. In or out.  
  
Two days later, there is a pile of flattened cardboard outside in the hall.  
  
Amy buys a shelf instead.

Their apartment is a glorious (somewhat more organized) mess.


	2. Hers

Amy hates clutter.  
  
Hates it.  
  
She tolerates a certain amount of mess at work because being a cop is a gritty job and she's not afraid to get her hands dirty. She even puts up with Jake's messes to a certain degree. She's not his mother; she doesn't want to be the girlfriend that nags him to pick up after himself.  
  
But when they start living together, she realizes that something's got to give. The square footage is too small to divide their space into his and hers. Amy buys closet organizers and stores her things carefully away. Jake just leaves his stuff all over the place. To be fair, he started selling off some items he had more than three of - which helped to chip away at his crushing debt. Still, their living space is an overlapping gnarl of porcelain knick knacks and Xbox cables. Amy is suffocating.  
  
It would shock no one to discover that Amy loves a certain amount of order (she can't completely relax without it, actually). Jake complains once that Amy would dissemble a jigsaw puzzle to sort the pieces by color.  
  
Amy scoffs and says that he doesn't appreciate her aesthetic.  
  
Growing up with seven brothers, Amy never had space that was purely hers. Privacy was a luxury that she couldn't afford. At a certain age her parents decided it wasn't appropriate for her to share a room with the boys anymore, so they moved her into the storage room instead. Of her childhood bedroom, Amy remembers a pink floral curtain for a doorway, the smell of sweaty football equipment in the fall and hockey gear in the winter.  
  
Cleanliness means independence. Mess means subservience.  
  
Cleanliness is control. Cleanliness is respect. Mess means that someone else's carelessness is more important to them than her distinct personhood.  
  
Young Amy kept her dolls lined up (in descending order of age, of course) in the back of her closet where they couldn't be kidnapped by interlopers. She was always on defense because let's face it, brothers don't understand the concept of 'keep out' unless it's spelled out on knuckles against their nose.  
  
Teenage Amy's room was a sanctuary.  
  
When her oldest brothers moved out, she finally had a proper room. She borrowed her dad's toolbox to install a lock that she bought with money she earned from babysitting. She put up bookshelves and installed a mirror so she wouldn't have to fight for bathroom time to do her makeup.  
  
Abuela said that girls were like butterflies - they needed their own space and time to decide what they were going to become.  
  
Present Amy thinks that Abuela was on to something. Her sanctuary is gone now. She loves Jake, but if she has to sort through another sloppy stack of comic books and year-old PC Gamer magazines to find the phone bill, she's going to lose it.  
  
This has gone on for long enough.  
  
When a case takes Jake away for a long weekend, she seizes the opportunity. Amy does a marathon deep clean of the whole apartment, her abuela's records playing in the background and a scented candle filling the space with the smell of cinnamon spice instead of stale Cheetoes. She can't remember the last time she felt this relaxed. 

 

She's not unreasonable. If she wants Jake to step up his efforts to respect her space, she's prepared to make the first move. She packs some of her older knick knacks and clothes she never wears in boxes to go into storage, piling them in a neat stack in the living room.

That's when Jake walks in, his plaid shirt ruffled and dark shadows under his eyes. He goes to toss his jacket on the counter and freezes.

She gives him a nervous smile as he surveys the spotless living room. Tells him she wanted to surprise him. An explanation sits on her tongue. She's about to tell him that the apartment needed some love and she wanted to show him that she was ready to do her part to maintain their living space. She's about to explain that they won't have to search for fifteen minutes to find the DVD they're looking for thanks to her organization system-

when he turns around and walks out the door.

She thinks that maybe he left something in the car, but twenty minutes pass and there's no sign of his return. So she goes looking. She finds him on the roof, leaning against an air conditioning unit. His shoulders are slumped and he's looking out at the city lights beyond the bridge. 

 

 

 

Anxiety curdles her stomach. She wonders if something has gone horribly wrong on the case, if Boyle is alright, if he was injured or the perp went free.

Jake shifts at her presence and won't look up at her. He moistens his lips. Says that he's a little surprised, but he doesn't blame her. His voice is unsteady as he tells her he hopes that they can still be friends and he promises, promises that he'll try to keep it professional at the office-

-and Amy is speechless because she has no idea where this is coming from; she wanted to do something nice for the both of them and now they're breaking up at eleven thirty and she has to work in the morning-

Jake is forcing this god-awful laugh, making a stupid joke about how he guesses she can say I told you so, because let's be real, it was never going to work between them, and maybe it was stupid to try, but he just  _wanted_ this so much-

Then she's kissing him. It's a desperate, hungry thing, even though he is granite beneath her touch. Jake turns his head away and he looks so lost and confused that she has to remind him  _I want this, too_.

 

He glances back at her. In the dim yellow light of distant streetlamps, his pupils are wide and deep and she feels like she can see all the fears contained within. His voice is small as he says  _then why did you pack?_  

She lets out a startled, hysterical laugh. He flinches, but she presses on.  _I'm not leaving, you idiot. I'm just cleaning up. Those boxes are going into storage - it's so crowded in there I can't breathe sometimes._

The tension drains from his shoulders and he mirrors her surprised laugh. He lets his hands slip around her waist and he pulls her flush against him, like he's afraid to let go.

Amy presses her head into the hollow by his neck, the one that feels as though it was made for her. She inhales his cologne and traces promises into his back with her fingernails.

He tells her about living in and out of boxes as a kid. Explains how, to him, messy means not leaving. She tells him about her storage bedroom. Explains how, to her, cleanliness means respect. She's sorry for scaring him and he's sorry for not listening to her. They agree they need to figure out a compromise if they want to make this work (and they so badly want to make this work). 

He pressed chapped lips against her forehead and sighs into her hairline. Apologizes again for freaking out. He's still working on this 'believing people care about him' thing.

She squeezes him tight before leaning back, reminding him of one thing that should show him that she isn't going anywhere.

Amy holds her left hand out. The ring he gave her sparkles in the light of distant street lamps.

They are, the two of them, one glorious mess. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I sat down at the keyboard and this happened.
> 
> Hope the parallels felt okay for you guys and not too heavy-handed. While I really liked the last line of the first chapter, it stuck with me that Amy would struggle to deal with living like Jake does until she understood why he's so messy. I kept chewing on that idea and then my fingers slipped.
> 
> Inspiration was drawn from my childhood living in and out of boxes. I've got a slough of older brothers and definitely lived in a storage room with a curtain for a door before. This stuff happens in big families, man. The difference is that I accepted boxes as part of the furniture. They aren't going away now. We're in this for the long haul.
> 
> Let me know what you think!


End file.
